“Geoff, I haven’t walked barefoot through hell this long to check out now.”
After having taken care of a number of client calls and queries, Geoff decided to call Kerry. Maybe she would want to have a fax of the picture Deidre had brought in. Or maybe I just want to talk to her, he admitted to himself.
When her secretary put her through, Kerry’s frightened voice sent chills through Geoff. “I just opened a Federal Express package that Dr. Smith sent me. Inside was a note and Suzanne’s jewelry case and the card that must have come with the sweetheart roses. Geoff, he admits he lied about Skip and the jewelry. He told me that by the time I read this he’ll have committed suicide.”
“My God, Kerry, did-“
“No, it’s not that. You see, he didn’t. Geoff, Mrs. Carpenter from his office just called me. When Dr. Smith didn’t come in for an early appointment, and didn’t answer the phone, she went to his house. His door was open a crack and she went in. She found his body lying in the foyer. He’d been shot, and the house ransacked. Geoff, was it because someone didn’t want Dr. Smith to change his testimony and was looking for the jewelry? Geoff, who is doing this? Will Robin be next?”
86
At nine-thirty that morning, Jason Arnott looked out the window, saw the cloudy, overcast sky and felt vaguely depressed. Other than some residual achiness in his legs and back, he was over the bug or virus that had laid him low over the weekend. But he could not overcome the uneasy sense that something was wrong.
It was that damn FBI flyer, of course. But he had felt the same way after that night in Congressman Peale’s house. A few of the downstairs lamps that were on an automatic switch had been on when he got there, but the upstairs rooms were all dark. He had been coming down the hallway, carrying the painting and the lockbox that he had pried from the wall, when he heard footsteps coming up the stairs. He had barely had time to hold the painting in front of his face when light flooded the hallway.
Then he had heard the quavering gasp, “Oh, dear God,” and knew it was the congressman’s mother. He hadn’t intended to hurt her. Instinctively he had rushed toward her, holding the painting as a shield, intending only to knock her down and grab her glasses so he could make his getaway. He had spent a long time talking with her at Peale’s inaugural party, and he knew she was blind as a bat without them.
But the heavy portrait frame had caught the side of her head harder than he intended, and she had toppled backwards the stairs. He knew from that final gurgle that she made before she went still that she was dead. For months afterward he had looked over his shoulder, expecting to see someone coming toward him with handcuffs.
Now, no matter how hard he tried to convince himself otherwise, the FBI flyer was giving him that same case of the jitters.
After the Peale case, his only solace had been to feast his eyes on the John White Alexander masterpiece At Rest, which he had taken that night. He kept it in the master bedroom of the Catskill house just as Peale had kept it in his master bedroom. It was so amusing to know that thousands of people trooped through the Metropolitan Museum of Art to gaze on its companion piece, Repose. Of the two, he preferred At Rest. The reclining figure of a beautiful woman had the same long sinuous lines as Repose, but the closed eyes, the look on the sensual face reminded him now of Suzanne.
The miniature frame with her portrait was on his night table, and it amused him to have both in his room, even though the imitation Faberg’ frame was unworthy of the glorious company it kept. The night table was gilt and marble, an exquisite example of Gothic Revival, and had been obtained in the grand haul when he had hired a van and practically emptied the Merriman house.
He would call ahead. He enjoyed arriving there to find the heat on and the refrigerator stocked. Instead of using his home phone, however, he would call his housekeeper on a cellular phone that was registered to one of his aliases.
Inside what seemed to be a repair van of Public Service Gas and Electric the signal came that Arnott was making a call. As the agents listened, they smiled triumphantly at each other. “I think we are about to trace the foxy Mr. Arnott to his lair,” the senior agent on the job observed. They listened as Jason concluded the conversation by saying, “Thank you, Maddie. I’ll leave here in an hour and should be there by one.”
Maddie’s heavy monotone reply was, “I’ll have ready for you. You can count on me.”
87
Frank Green was trying a case, and it was noon before Kerry was able to inform him of Smith’s murder and the Federal Express packet she had received from him late that morning. She was fully composed now and wondered why she had allowed herself to lose control when Geoff had phoned. But her emotions were something that she would explore later. For now, the knowledge that Joe Palumbo was parked outside Robin’s school, waiting to escort her home and then stand watch at the house until Kerry got home, was enough to help relieve her immediate fears.
Green went carefully through the contents of the jewelry box comparing each piece with those Smith had mentioned in the letter he had included in the package to Kerry. “Zodiac bracelet,” he read. “That’s right here. Watch with gold numerals, ivory face, diamond and gold band. Okay. Here it is. Emerald and diamond ring set in pink gold. That’s right here. Antique diamond bracelet. Three bands of diamonds attached by diamond clasps.” He held it up. “That’s a beauty.”
“Yes. You may remember Suzanne was wearing that bracelet when she was murdered. There was one more piece, antique diamond pin or double pin, that Skip Reardon had described. Dr. Smith doesn’t mention it, and apparently he didn’t have it, but Geoff just faxed me a picture from a local newspaper showing Suzanne wearing that pin only a few weeks before she died. It never showed up in the items found at the house. You can see that it’s very much like the bracelet and obviously an antique. The other pieces are beautiful, but very modern in design.”
Kerry looked closely at the blurred reproduction and understood why Deidre Reardon had described it as evoking a mother-and-child image. As she’d explained, the pin appeared to be in two parts, the larger being a flower, the smaller a bud. They were attached by a chain. She studied it for a moment, perplexed because it looked oddly familiar.
“We’ll watch out for this pin to see if it is mentioned in Haskell’s receipts,” Green promised. “Now let’s get this straight. As far as you know, everything the doctor mentioned, excluding this particular pin, is the total of the jewelry Suzanne asked the doctor to tell Skip he gave her?”
“According to what Smith wrote in his letter, and it does coincide with what Skip Reardon told me Saturday.”
Green put down Smith’s letter. “Kerry, do you think you might have been followed when you went to see Smith yesterday?”
“I think now I probably was. That’s why I’m so concerned about Robin’s safety.”
“We’ll keep a squad car outside your house tonight, but I wouldn’t be unhappy to have you and Robin out of there and in some more secure place with all this coming to a head. Jimmy Weeks is a cornered animal. Royce may be able to tie him to tax fraud, but with what you’ve uncovered, we may be able to tie him to a murder.”
“You mean because of the card Jimmy sent with the sweetheart roses?” The card was already being analyzed by handwriting experts, and Kerry had reminded Green of the paper found in Haskell’s lawyer’s pocket after both men had been murdered.
“Exactly. No clerk in a flower shop drew those musical notes. Imagine describing an inscription like that over the phone. From what I understand, Weeks is a pretty good amateur musician. The life of the party when he sits down at the piano. That kind. With that card-and if the jewelry ties in to those receipts-the Reardon case is a
